Prelude has the goal to ease the initial Emacs setup process and to provide you with a much more powerful and productive experience than that you get out of the box. By using Emacs Prelude you're basically getting a "Get me out of the Prelude, I just want to use Emacs" card.

Assuming you're using an Unix-like OS (*BSD, GNU/Linux, OS X, Solaris, etc), you already have Emacs 24 installed, as well as git & curl you can skip the whole manual and just type in your favorite shell the following command:

# curl -L https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/raw/master/utils/installer.sh | sh# You really should not be running commands from an anonymously editable wiki

Prelude adds a lot of functionality from whitespace mode, including line-ending markers, highlighting of long-lines, space visualization. If you find these distracting, add the following to a file in your personal directory:

did not work. But copying the content of prelude directory to .emacs.d worked as expected.

Note: it also expects git to be on the system paths defined in PATH. I used git from Cygwin. It worked.

On Windows XP - specifically for using clojure stuff, installing Prelude along the way:

NOTE: i had msysgit on my pc before I started this and I wouldn't be surprised if that put utilities in my path that made this all easier. But I didn't run cygwin or run inside bash or anything, I did it all from powershell and emacs.

You want to have git in your path
You want to have lein in your path
You want to have java in your path
You want to have clojure installed. A mystery to me - how does lein find clojure? I have clojure installed at c:\clojure, there's nothing in the path, things just worked when I went to run cider-jack-in, I don't know how clojure got located.

In emacs, do C-x shell, and if you can't run java -help, git, and lein, figure that out. Download the lein.bat file from leiningen.org, put it in a folder that is in your path, and run "lein self-install"

Once you have those prerequisite:

When you install prelude, you REPLACE your .emacs.d directory. IF you have anything you want in in init.el, or anything else in .emacs.d, rename the whole .emacs.d directory. It's going to be under /documents and settings/paul.footwarmer/.emacs.d, unless your name isn't paul.footwarmer. So rename .emacs.d or erase it. Then, in cmd or powershell, cd to /documents and settings/paul.footwarmer. Now run: